what if a much of a which of a wind gives truth to the summer's lie; bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun and yanks immortal stars awry? . . .what if a keen of a lean wind flays screaming hills with sleet and snow: strangles valleys by ropes of thing and stifles forests in white ago? ---e e cummings
photo credit: Saad Chaudhry, Upsplash
Hello Lovelies—
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Two days before the total eclipse winds collide with the Front Range, blasting the mountains and plains with 100 mph sometimes snow-filled bursts that ricochet and circulate frigid air. The local power company, still paying settlements for the sparking lines that caused the 2021 Marshall Fire, Colorado’s most destructive wildfire, announces it will “proactively de-energize” service.
Traffic lights are already out as I blow west into the mountains from Boulder to meet Greg. We have planned a sweet evening out but the wind and the power outages shift our landscape. Instead, we opt to meet in Ned, the nearest mountain town to home, where the local Indian restaurant is, in a miracle of fishes and loaves, serving food.
I sit by a window in the dim, unlit dining room and wait for Greg, watching the grey sky and the dust-colored town, still wearing its winter brown, absent of tourists and locals alike. Most businesses have been shuttered. Darkened storefronts line the road and the streets are absent of cars. A stormy late afternoon gloom lays over the town.
This is what Armageddon looks like, I think, as pine boughs and gravel, bursts of snow and birds, tumble by, thrown by wind.
I order a Singha, happy for a cold beer, and even happier for Greg who appears, clean-shaven and wearing the red ski sweater I gave him one Christmas. We are not sure how the restaurant has heated our korma or curry or fried our pakoras, but the mystery of it makes the food more delicious. Here is a moment of something very good on a day when the air is thick with dread.
None of us knows what is going to happen.
Nature is the most apex of apex predators.
Wind this strong can rip signs from storefronts, shatter windows, uproot 30-foot pines and send them crashing across roads or into the sides of homes.
For now the outcome is a dark continent lurking on the horizon.. Each of us feels it, a shadowy thought at the back of the mind, a quiet unease that covers the day.
It is always this way when weather, when the awesome power of nature, exerts itself: the five-foot snow of a few weeks ago that stranded some folks for a week, this windstorm, the 1000-year flood in Jamestown that reconfigured an entire town.
Knocked off routines, prevented from carrying on as usual, we enter unfamiliar territory.
Losing power is so normal where I live that many folks have backup generators. Most of us do our best to be prepared with headlamps and candles, battery powered lanterns, jugs of water for drinking or to flush toilets and to use for cooking, extra wood for the fireplace, plenty of matches.
But it’s the unanswered question of the next few hours, the next few days, that is palpable now. Prepared or not, we simply don’t know what will happen.
One of the reasons I live where I do is that I prefer to let nature order my days. Not only because I feel more deeply rooted in my life when I am entrenched in its rhythms but because I like to be reminded that I don’t have a super-sized presence on the planet.
Nature is the most apex of apex predators. And I respect this.
So although the storm makes the day strange, I feel content to follow its charge. Greg and I return home to sleep in the wind-tossed ship of our house. When we wake the next day without power, wind roaring down the mountain still. We enter the morning quietly, reading by the fire, waiting to for whatever is to come.
Thank you for reading.
Big love,
Karen
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“I don’t have a super sized presence on the planet.” That landed. ♥️
I appreciate your response. I agree - we’re part of natural and planetary systems that we barely understand - if at all, and which many refuse to acknowledge we are indeed part of. So here we are in 2024, facing enormous challenges and threats of our own making.
Thanks again for stimulating my contemplation on Nature and humans. Your depictions of Nature as a force, in your fiction and non-fiction, are really captivating to this reader … and not a little scary!